Nobel Peace Prize Goes Green...
Document Actions
Al Gore Shares Nobel Peace Prize
Former Vice President Al Gore, a passionate environmental crusader whose pivotal film "An Inconvenient Truth" won the 2007 academy award for best documentary film, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday October 12, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists.
Mr. Gore humbly remarked "I will accept this award on behalf of all the people that have been working so long and so hard to try to get the message out about this planetary emergency," and concluded "I’m going back to work right now."
Mr. Gore, who announced he would give his portion of the $1.5 million prize money to the nonprofit organization he founded last year, the Alliance for Climate Protection, said he was honored to share the prize with the panel, calling it "the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis."
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised both "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change." The award was an important validation for the United Nations panel, which in its early days was vilified by those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change. In New Delhi, the Indian climatologist who heads the panel, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said that science had won out over skepticism.
The climate panel, established in 1988, has issued a series of increasingly grim reports in the last two decades assessing issues surrounding climate change. It is expected to issue another report in the next few months, before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Indonesia on December 3.
Source: New York Times
